Currently Listening Strange and Beautiful By Aqualung see related

One month to the day.  Good intentions mean nothing.  I have been typing papers all weekend, when I'm not watching movies and getting my car fixed that is.  There is something incredible dispiriting about typing out the paper that has been floating around as unfixed ideas in my head for weeks.  I finished a first draft of one yesterday and I need to get going on the other now, but writing it will KILL everything about it that is worth reading.  I wish I could just telepath it to my professor and not have to worry about translating it into language that everyone can understand.  My thought-life is much more interesting than the textual representation of it.  I can't work here.  I need to leave again.  Starbucks for the third day in a row.  Yipee.

Good morning.  I am sitting at my dining room table, eating toast and drinking some tea.  I should be writing a paper proposal right now, but I felt like posting instead.  The proposal will get done, so do not be worried on my account.  I have been meaning to start writing again on a regular basis.  We will see if this is the beginning of a more extended habit.

The Life-Cycle of this Curious Creature

One of my professors wrote this in his syllabus.  The curious creature he is referring to is a grad student.  Now that I have been one for a full two months (it seems much longer) I think I can reflect on the experience.  I really enjoy it.  We do, however, lead a kind of strange existence.  We are students, but we are also teachers.  We are constantly being pressured to specialize.  I have been asked about my "area of interest" so many times.  It's kind of like the "what are you going to do when you graduate" question.  It is best just to make up an answer.  Well.  Perhaps now I will introduce you to some of my professors.

Dr. Gogo - Dr. Gogo teaches all the linguistics courses here.  I am taking Minimalist Syntax with her this semester.  She is a woman in her late fourties- early fifties with long salt and pepper hair, more salt than pepper actually.  She often wears it in a long braid.  She has bangs, and the hair on her temples is curly so it frizzes out from her head.  This gives her a mad-scientist, crazy woman in the attic look.  In the class she has to come up with lots of sample sentences.  They are often very funny and involve being attacked by bears.  When she gives us an example of a sentence that is ungrammatical, she makes a face.  Based on her expression, you would think that bad grammar leaves a bad taste in her mouth, literally.  I like her.

Dr. Huggable - This is the professor who provided the quote above.  He is also the professor for whom I should be writing a research proposal right now.  Dr. Huggable is a literature professor.  I believe he specializes in 19th century British Lit.  I know that he has published a paper on James Joyce's Ulysses, although why anyone would want to read that monster, let alone write about it, is beyond me.  He teaches Intro to Grad Studies, a course I expected to be unbearably boring, but which has turned out to be quite helpful.  Dr. Huggable is youngish (mid 30's) and handsome in a kind of intellectual, Seattlite way.  He is refreshingly unpretentious, and very honest about how universities work.  Last week he told us that he was going to come to class on halloween dressed as "a disorganized, untenured professor."  He is my favorite professor.

I have two more, but I will have to come back to them later.  Paper proposal must be put off no longer.

Last night I found a new word in the dictionary.  Mellifluous.  It means "of a voice: pleasing, musical, flowing."  It comes from the Latin words mel meaning "honey" and fluere meaning "to flow." I wonder how many other metaphors and similes are imbedded in our words.  I also looked up melododious to see if it came from the same root, but it comes from the Greek word melos, song.  Isn't it strange that two words that sound so much alike and have similar meanings can come from two different words in two different languages?

This morning before work I went to Barnes and Noble to try and find a Book of Common Prayer.  Surprisingly I could not locate one, but while looking around the Cultural Studies section (my new favorite section of B & N.  It never fails to fascinate me) I came across a collection of postcards that had been sent in to Post Secret.  I'm not exactly sure when this started, but it was an art project that asked people to write their secrets on postcards and send them in to this address.  The response was quite large.  (I think this idea has been duplicated since then.  In fact I believe Whitworth did something like this last year.  I wasn't there of course, I just heard.)  There were all sorts of things written, though most could fall into one of a few catagories.  One that stuck in my mind was a woman wrote, "I wished on a dandelion that my husband would die."  I don't know quite what to make of the whole concept.  The originators of the art project and the authors of the book seemed to think it was a healing and cathartic activity for most of those who submitted secrets.  I wonder if perhaps telling an annonymous entity made people feel better about not telling them to the people who really needed to hear them (family, husband, pastor, psychiatrist)  But then again, maybe one needs to tell the truth to ones self before attempting it with others (Probably it is not a matter of what one should do as opposed to what one is able to do.  You can not tell a truth you do not know.)  I heard a faculty member at Whitworth say once that you can't repent of what you do not acknowledge.  She was the head of the counselling department and was trying to come up with an answer of what a Christian who has homosexual impulses should do assuming he does not intend to give in to them.  It holds true for other sins as well.  Recognition is a hard thing to call out in ones self.  It makes me look at the Holy Spirit's conviction a little differently.  It is not only God pointing out our sins, but it is also him helping us to ackowledge them so that we can repent.